What a whooping 72M€ round tells us about the future of food
Last month, Wynd unveiled a new funding round of 72M€ which comes on top of previous 40M€+ initial rounds.
Here is ShakeUp Factory’s take on this great piece of news:
What does Wynd tell us about the future of foodtech?
Some may be surprised to list Wynd as a foodtech company: it’s in fact at the same a pure tech company, addressing the most burning needs of retail and restauration, where they initially started but with a very specific focus on food. They are at the forefront of omnichannel solutions for food e-commerce management with a set of functionalities ranging from mobile ordering to live inventory management through virtual payment solutions.
Their traction can be explained by the need of food retailers and foodservice companies to be able to answer in real time to consumers wanting any type of food, would it be cooked, semi-prepared or not to be made available or delivered to them at the moment that suits them at best.
Thanks to solutions like Wynd they can turn and deploy their brick and mortar offer online under the form of any kind of digital platform — marketplace, web apps, proprietary app — and with the suit of back end solutions that are needed to manage such business — CRM, inventory and fulfillment management, coordination of order preparation and deliveries.
What the success of Wynd proves is the acceleration of what we can name the Amazonification of food, i.e. the necessity for traditional food businesses to be made available 24/7 and to answer any kind of consumers expectation and journey if they want to stay attractive.
What does Wynd tell us about the future of retail?
We see a lot of hype around cashless store or autonomous warehouse with US and UK startups at the forefront of technologies; delivery robots or autonomous cars also are hype and well funded. And we shall also mention novel payment solutions that have already proved being a major theme of innovation worldwide.
Wynd sits at the crossroad of all these new technologies with a unique capability to integrate all of them into seamless journeys and front ends to better address the expectations and reduce frictions for consumers but also customers. Wynd has anticipated the need that most retailers will have to add new services of added value that are highly complex to integrate and which deliver only if they respond in real due time the right price, the effective availability or the forecasted timing. And if you look around you’ll probably understand that there aren’t that many notable new companies in this field. It’s also interesting to note that these solutions will also be of much interest for many CPG brands which have their own retail network and/or want to deploy direct to consumer commerce.
Last but not least such as such platforms are at the center of every interactions and third parties, they concentrate the data that will be the fuel for personalization and loyalty management.
What does Wynd tell us about the French foodtech?
We can only be proud to see such kind of champions emerge in France: they have been able to build on a fertile ground of the numerous retailers and restauration companies that make the French food business so vivid and dynamic.
France is the European country that counts the highest rate and concentration of retail stores per capita. It’s also the home ground of foodservice leading companies such as Sodexo and Elior. It proves that Paris is consolidating its financial capacity to support breakthrough scale-ups at the most challenging moment of its development. It also confirms that France is a very attractive environment for building on talents and deploying R&D activities: even if it seems odd for most foreigners it happens that most recent adaptations of French employment regulations make it possible to grow from 50 to 400 people in less than 2 years.
What does Wynd tell us about entrepreneurship?
Not every company is this space may have such a vision of the future of its business like the one that Ismaël could gradually build over the past 2 years, being able to project like no other his clients in what the future of their business will be. He also proves that ambition is not a bad word when it’s about trying to stay ahead and aiming at being a reference and alternative to such big names such as SAP, Oracle and their peers.
And last but not least he, from the very beginning of its company, targeted and anticipated the need to be global: they were only 15 people in the company when he was already pitching on stage at the very first international foodtech conference in San Francisco — BonAppetech in October 2015, where Wynd was not only the only French startup, but even the only non-American one.
9 months later he was in Tel Aviv where he was able to pitch someone who became his first Chinese client…
What does Wynd tell us about ShakeUpFactory?
Let us just share the following quote from Ismaël:
“Those guys are amazing in their capability to understand the dynamics of the foodtech environment, their commitment at the side of founders and their understanding of the so many needs of companies like Wynd when they are hyper-growing. I’m not sure Wynd would have achieved such a journey to date without their implication”.
That’s all for today, thanks for reading!
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